At home with Angus Stone

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Solo act: Australian singer-songwriter Angus Stone – who often appears with his sister Julia – has a new album, “Broken Brights.”

Angus Stone recently unmasked a criminal. Thefts were striking his off-the grid farm on the east coast of Australia, where he raises cattle and grows vegetables accompanied only by his trusty kelpie-greyhound mix Inca.

Every day when he fed his chickens, more eggs were missing from the coop. The culprit? A fat opossum, who began to sun himself on a nearby tree afterward, licking his chops.

Angus Stone

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“I’ve been putting little sacrificial eggs out now, just for him, so he doesn’t go in the pen,” says the animal lover.

Stone — half of the brother- sister duo Angus and Julia Stone, and playing San Francisco today backing his first solo foray, “Broken Brights” — treasured such distractions.

His mind has been elsewhere lately, contemplating the breakup of his two-year relationship with Aussie actress Isabel Lucas, a romance delicately documented in acoustic “Brights” ballads such as “Only a Woman,” “Be What You Be” and

“Bird on the Buffalo,” whose Lucas-starring video was shot when the two were still an item.

Now, like Adele and her heartbroken “21” diary, Stone has to sing these lost-love paeans on tour.

“Playing these songs is a process, and every night I’m shedding, shedding off my old feelings,” Stone says. But he can’t lie. “Some nights, you just can’t shake them. Sometimes it really hurts.”

So he was happy to lose himself in fishing, surfing, even beekeeping. “I’ve always got honey,” he says. “I have the solar panels and water tanks, but I run off a generator, as well. So I could live here forever and not know what’s going on in the outside world. And it’s good to live like that.”

Yet the singer (who also has a new album with his sister in the can) is grateful to have met the gorgeous “Immortals” star Lucas.

Introduced by a friend, they quickly discovered that they were cut from the same environmentalist cloth, and the album’s opening fiddle-underscored strummer “River Love” — with the lyric “Heading north to San Francisco/Wild horses in my head” — recalls the couple’s first getaway to Northern California’s redwoods, where they clicked.

“She made me want to write again, and I feel like everything I did was for her,” he says.

But two years is an eternity in showbiz. So when the end came, Stone says, “I think we were pretty clear about it. This world we’re in was taking us off in different directions.”

Still, he’s happy to be touring. And just as relieved, he says, “when it switches off and I’m back home again, with all this space. Just me and Inca!”